A New Year’s Primer: Getting Back on the Horse

When I was 12, my parents decided that their children could be improved by horseback riding.  We jammed into the station wagon and found our way to a country stable flush with mares, stallions, and bales of hay.

The horse chosen for me was tall, sleek and powerful. His name was RIP (I kid you not).    Hoisted into the saddle my excitement nosedived.  I hadn’t envisioned being halfway to heaven.  Nor, that managing reins and riding crop would be so hard.

RIP read me in less time than it took to enter the ring.   The world suddenly became a river of light as he bolted.  Around we went, the air an errie vacuum of terror.  I clung with what little I had until a pair of stable hands grabbed his bit and we lurched to a halt.  But RIP was having none of it.  As they tried to steady him, he bucked and reared.  More stable hands, more men.

Someone slid what was left of me – my sack of bones, my jelly legs and beating heart — off the horse and led me out of the ring.  I was dizzy and nauseous and more disoriented than ever in my short life.

As I tried to regain myself on a bench, Mrs. Fahey, the stocky, no-nonsense mistress of Foxhall Stables, strode over.

Without a shred of pity, she looked down at me and said, “You need to get back on right away.  That’s the only way to learn.”

***

It has taken me decades to understand that she was right.  But with a few caveats, which I will get to in a moment.

 

Life’s bucks and bolts are infinitely inventive.  My recent turn came a year or so ago, in a succession of what felt like earthquakes.   Calamities like freezing pipes, sudden accidents, shifts in family life, unexpected deaths.  To say nothing of COVID.  The horse of life had thrown me  — at times, I thought, for good.

I took the dark months of the pandemic to look the animal full in the eye.  With books, walks and prayer, and my community of friends and faithful fellow worshippers at church and at my retreat house, I regained balance, reset priorities, and reconsidered the saddle.

I am back — if not halfway to heaven, no longer on retreat — having learned things about courage and resilience and standing for what matters.  In retrospect, these were lessons I had already learned, and well, but had taken for granted until they were no longer as alert and alive as they needed to be.   Why?  Because life gets too darned busy and distracting, and it is easier to focus on the next task in front of me.  The urgent overtakes the truly important.

I’m back, to talk about the important things going forward.

To start, I want to share my primer for getting back on the horse, because so many of you I know are feeling out of whack, out of touch with themselves, distracted, dizzy and disoriented as I was after my adventure with RIP.

1. It’s okay to put your soul into the ICU for a time. Hibernate if you must.  But do so with intention.  You don’t want to stay on the sidelines forever.  And do so with the company of books, websites, music and natural beauty that feeds you.
2. You aren’t so much looking to understand (important as that may be down the road) as to recover your hope. Shocks and setbacks isolate us.  Find what sparks hope for you.  It may be hiding somewhere you least expect to find it.  A good read: Katherine May’s Wintering.
3. Pick up a 20-minute-a-day meditation practice.
4. Walk.  Walk.  Walk.  As much as you can.
5. Treat yourself to a new journal and consider joining my spring in-person workshop, Our Sacred Stories. 
6. Remember that you are loved.

See you soon!